A number of people emailed me about this in the New York Times:

An international consortium, including Indian and American companies as well as the World Bank, is planning to establish thousands of rural Internet centers in India to bring government, banking and education services to isolated villages.

The project, to be announced Thursday, is intended to bring Internet-based services to individuals who must often travel long distances to conduct banking or business with the government. It is being undertaken by Comat Technologies, an Indian provider of Internet services; ICICI Bank, India's second- largest commercial bank; and Wyse Technology of San Jose, Calif., which makes computer terminal equipment.

The goal is to serve rural villages with populations of more than 5,000. Ultimately the plan calls for centers or kiosks in 5,000 villages in the state of Karnataka; Bangalore, the Indian high-technology center, is the capital of Karnataka.

The project, subsidized by the state government, will include money to train residents in computer skills. It comes after some disappointing results of earlier efforts to bridge the digital divide, which separates the Internet-connected world from less-developed areas.

The centers, connected to the Internet by either land lines or satellite links, are each to consist of 5 to 10 inexpensive "thin clients," simple computer displays that are more rugged and less expensive than personal computers.

[via Om Malik] Light Reading writes: "Huawei, ZTE and UTStarcom are each beginning to pitch “integrated” hardware, software, and integration solutions for carriers deploying IPTV. That pitch is so far being heard mainly by telecom operators in Asia."

Clay Shirky writes:

Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.

I also want to convince you that what we're seeing when we see the Web is actually a radical break with previous categorization strategies, rather than an extension of them. The second part of the talk is more speculative, because it is often the case that old systems get broken before people know what's going to take their place. (Anyone watching the music industry can see this at work today.) That's what I think is happening with categorization.

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units -- the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging -- free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints -- seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.

Michael Parekh writes:

...Devices in sizes ranging from a paperback to a cigarette pack (remember those?) have enough storage and display to act like a laptop in a pinch. This gets interesting, especially if either Microsoft and/or Apple can get their desktop operating systems to run on them. And they're beginning to...there is an emergent category of computers called handtop PCs.

In fact, Steve Jobs' description of the Mac Mini as a "Bring your own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse", aka BYODKM, has sparked its own thriving community of Mac and Windows enthusiasts. Microsoft may also be moving in this direction, with its next generation game machine, the XBOX 360 likely putting in double duty as a media center that could also be used in lower cost, application specific ways, according to a recent Bill Gates interview with Engadget.com.

In BYODKM is a clue on a major direction that computing is moving towards, and the OS companies like Microsoft, and Apple are likely already focused on. Given the explosion of digital applications like photos, video, music, games (online and off), and textual blogs, along with the popularity of home wireless networks, users are seeing a growing fragmentation in where their core applications and data are stored at any time and where it might be needed on a moment's notice.

Indeed, with companies like Google, with GMail, making eventually unlimited storage available on line, the world opens to a whole new way of computing on the go.

Currently the burden of remembering what is stored and where, and the effort of getting it to another location that it's needed, consumes increasing amount of user cycles. Ideally, it should just consume software and processing cycles, where "the system" figure out where something is, and needs to go.

Dare Obasanjo points to a post by Moz Hussain: "In a people centric world, I see two major dimensions of people interaction: who I want to know about and who I want to share information with. This leads to four distinct segments: The Content Consumer, The Relationship Builder, The Social Networker, The Content Creator."

Dear Abhishek,

Technologies – old and new – will be as much part of your life as the air you breathe. So, I thought a good starting point to think about the future and put it in perspective would be to look at it from the eyes of one of the most respected technology publications, MIT’s Technology Review. For the past few years, it has been publishing a list of 10 emerging technologies. While some of these sound gobbledygook even to me, you will get an idea of the world that is being created.

Here is the 2005 list: Airborne Networks, Quantum Wires, Silicon Photonics, Metabolomics, Magnetic-Resonance Force Microscopy, Universal Memory, Bacterial Factories
Environmatics, Cell-Phone Viruses and Biomechatronics.

Last year, Technology Review had this list: Universal Translation, Synthetic Biology, Nanowires, Bayesian Machine Learning, T-Rays, Distributed Storage, RNA Interference, Power Grid Control, Microfluidic Optical Fibers and Personal Genomics.

Go back a year and you find this list: Wireless Sensor Networks, Injectable Tissue Engineering, Nano Solar Cells, Mechatronics, Grid Computing, Molecular Imaging, Nanoimprint Lithography, Software Assurance, Glycomics and Quantum Cryptography.

In 2001, this was the list: Brain-Machine Interface, Flexible Transistors, Data Mining, Digital Rights Management, Biometrics, Natural Language Processing, Microphotonics, Untangling Code, Robot Design and Microfluidics.

As you can see, there is plenty to think about! A lot of innovation is happening across multiple areas. For good measure, here is a list from CNN of the top 10 innovations (from a list of 25) of the past quarter century: Internet, Cell phone, Personal computers, Fiber optics, E-mail, Commercialized GPS, Portable computers, Memory storage discs, Consumer level digital camera and Radio frequency ID tags. How many of these would we have imagined in 1980?

As you ponder the impact of all these existing and emerging technologies, it will be good to keep in mind these words from The Wall Street Journal published a couple years ago:

Technology companies are often described as "inventing the future." Maybe they do. But they aren't very good at predicting it. That's how it is with the future: You never quite see it coming.

Let's not discount out of hand the idea that something unforeseen might appear on the scene to change things. Just don't expect to recognize it for what it is right away.

People in the technology world are forever searching for the "killer app" -- the must-have sure thing that the whole world will want to buy. Invariably, though, they never find the killer app; it finds them. You wake up one day and realize that you can't remember how you ever got along without, say, search engines.

It's a problem for technology companies. Most of the really transforming technologies bubble up in unexpected ways. More often than not, they require some sort of existing infrastructure, which they gently nudge in the direction of additional usefulness. The Internet, for instance, would never have happened without a vast and efficient telephone network, not to mention tens of millions of powerful PCs.

And these technologies are almost never envisioned in advance, but instead are appreciated after the fact, like the laser printer. Name your favorite technology. I'll bet it wasn't introduced with a big product launch. The typical pattern is that by doing something useful, simple and slightly new, it attracted customers and programmers who then began investing it with ever-more uses, many of them utterly unforeseen.